OpenAIRE-Connect: Open Science as a Service for repositories and research communities

Communication presented at "12th International Conference on Open Repositories" (OR 2017), Brisbane, Australia, 26-30 June 2017.OpenAIRE-Connect fosters transparent evaluation of results and facilitates reproducibility of science for research communities by enabling a scientific communication ecosystem supporting exchange of artefacts, packages of artefacts, and links between them across communities and across content providers. To this aim, OpenAIRE-Connect will introduce and implement the concept of Open Science as a Service (OSaaS) on top of the existing OpenAIRE infrastructure1, by delivering out-of-the-box, on-demand deployable tools in support of Open Science. OpenAIRE-Connect will realize and operate two OSaaS services. The first will serve research communities to (i) publish research artefacts (packages and links), and (ii) monitor their research impact. The second will engage and mobilize content providers, and serve them with services enabling notification-based exchange of research artefacts, to leverage their transition towards Open Science paradigms. Both services will be served on-demand according to the OSaaS approach, hence be re-usable by different disciplines and providers, each with different practices and maturity levels, so as to favor a shift towards a uniform cross-community and cross-content provider scientific communication ecosystem

OpenAIRE's DOIBoost - Boosting CrossRef for Research

Research in information science and scholarly communication strongly relies on the availability of openly accessible datasets of scholarly entities metadata and, where possible, their relative payloads. Since such metadata information is scattered across diverse, freely accessible, online resources (e.g. CrossRef, ORCID), researchers in this domain are doomed to struggle with (meta)data integration problems, in order to produce custom datasets of often undocumented and rather obscure provenance. This practice leads to waste of time, duplication of efforts, and typically infringes open science best practices of transparency and reproducibility of science. In this article, we describe how to generate DOIBoost, a metadata collection that enriches CrossRef with inputs from Microsoft Academic Graph, ORCID, and Unpaywall for the purpose of supporting high-quality and robust research experiments, saving times to researchers and enabling their comparison. To this aim, we describe the dataset value and its schema, analyse its actual content, and share the software Toolkit and experimental workflow required to reproduce it. The DOIBoost dataset and Software Toolkit are made openly available via Zenodo.org. DOIBoost will become an input source to the OpenAIRE information graph

A workflow language for research e-infrastructures

AbstractResearch e-infrastructures are "systems of systems," patchworks of resources such as tools and services, which change over time to address the evolving needs of the scientific process. In such environments, researchers carry out their scientific process in terms of sequences of actions that mainly include invocation of web services, user interaction with web applications, user download and use of shared software libraries/tools. The resulting workflows are intended to generate new research products (articles, datasets, methods, etc.) out of existing ones. Sharing a digital and executable representation of such workflows with other scientists would enforce Open Science publishing principles of "reproducibility of science" and "transparent assessment of science." This work presents HyWare, a language and execution platform capable of representing scientific processes in highly heterogeneous research e-infrastructures in terms of so-called hybrid workflows. Hybrid workflows can express sequences of "manually executable actions," i.e., formal descriptions guiding users to repeat a reasoning, protocol or manual procedure, and "machine-executable actions," i.e., encoding of the automated execution of one (or more) web services. An HyWare execution platform enables scientists to (i) create and share workflows out of a given action set (as defined by the users to match e-infrastructure needs) and (ii) execute hybrid workflows making sure input/output of the actions flow properly across manual and automated actions. The HyWare language and platform can be implemented as an extension of well-known workflow languages and platforms

Scholix Metadata Schema for Exchange of Scholarly Communication Links

The goal of the Scholix initiative is to establish a high level interoperability framework for exchanging information about the links between scholarly literature and data. It aims to enable an open information ecosystem to understand systematically what data underpins literature and what literature references data. The DLI Service is the first exemplar aggregation and query service fed by the Scholix open information ecosystem. The Scholix framework together with the DLI aggregation are designed to enable other 3rd party services (domain-specific aggregations, integrations with other global services, discovery tools, impact assessments etc). Scholix is an evolving lightweight set of guidelines to increase interoperability. It consists of: (i) a consensus among a growing group of publishers, datacentres, and global/ domain service providers to work collaboratively and systematically to improve exchange of data-literature link information, (ii) an Information model: conceptual definition of what is a Scholix scholarly link, (iii) Link metadata schema: metadata representation of a Scholix link. Options for exchange protocols (forthcoming) Scholix is the “wholesaler to wholesaler” exchange framework, to be implemented by existing hubs or global aggregators of data-literature link information such as DataCite, CrossRef, OpenAIRE, or EMBL-EBI. These hubs in turn work with their natural communities of data centres or literature publishers to collect the information through existing community-specific workflows and standards. Scholix thus enables interoperability between a smaller number of large hubs and leverages the existing exchange arrangements between those hubs and their natural communities (eg between CrossRef and journal publishers). Scholix is a technical solution to wholesale information aggregation; it will need to be complemented by other policy, practice and cultural change advocacy initiatives. This approach could be extended over time to other types of research objects in and beyond research (e.g. software, tweets, etc)

On Constructing Repository Infrastructures: The D-NET Software Toolkit

Due to the wide diffusion of digital repositories, organizations responsible for large research communities, such as national or project consortia, research institutions, foundations, are increasingly tempted into setting up so-called repository infrastructure systems (e.g., OAIster (http://www.oaister.org), BASE (http://www.base-search.net), DAREnet-NARCIS (http://www.narcis.info)). Such systems offer web portals, services and APIs for cross-operating over the metadata records of publications (lately also of experimental data and compound objects) aggregated from a set of repositories. Generally, they consist of two connected tiers: an aggregation system for populating an information space of metadata records by harvesting and transforming (e.g., cleaning, enriching) records from a set of OAI-PMH compatible data sources, typically repositories; and a web portal, providing end-users with advanced functionality over such information space (search, browsing, annotations, recommendations, collections, user profiling, etc). Typically, information spaces also offer access to third-party applications through standard APIs (e.g., OAI-PMH, SRW, OAI-ORE). Repository infrastructure systems address similar architectural and functional issues across several disciplines and application domains. On the one hand they all deal, with more or less contingent complexity, with the generic problem of harvesting metadata records of a given format, transform them into records of a target format and deliver web portals to operate over these records. On the other hand, they have to cope with arbitrary numbers of repositories, hence administering them, from automatic scheduling of harvesting and transformation actions, definition of relative transformation mappings, to the inherent scalability problems of coping with ever growing incoming records. Existing solutions tend to privilege customization of software, neglecting general-purpose approaches. Typically, for example, aggregation systems are designed to generate metadata records of a format X from records of format Y, and not be parametric with respect to such formats. Similarly, the participation of a repository to an infrastructure is driven by firm policies and administrators often do not have the freedom of specifying their own workflow, by combining as they prefer logical steps such as harvesting, storing, transforming, indexing and validating. In summary, repository infrastructure systems typically provide advanced and effective solutions tailored to the one scenario of interest, while can hardly be applicable to different scenarios, where similar but distinct requirements apply. As a consequence, an organization willing to set up a repository infrastructure system with peculiar requirements has to face the "expensive" problem of designing and developing a new software from scratch. In this paper, we present a general-purpose and cost-efficient solution for the construction of customized repository infrastructures, based on the D-NET Software Toolkit (www.d-net.research-infrastructures.eu), developed in the context of the DRIVER and DRIVER-II projects (http://www.driver-community.eu). D-NET offers a service-oriented framework, whose services can be combined by developers to easily construct customized aggregation systems and personalized web portals. D-NET services can be customized, extended and combined to match domain specific scenarios, while distribution, sharing and orchestration of services enables the construction of scalable and robust repository infrastructures. As we shall describe in the following, D-NET is currently the enabling software of a number of European projects and national initiatives

On Constructing Repository Infrastructures: The D-NET Software Toolkit

Due to the wide diffusion of digital repositories, organizations responsible for large research communities, such as national or project consortia, research institutions, foundations, are increasingly tempted into setting up so-called repository infrastructure systems (e.g., OAIster (http://www.oaister.org), BASE (http://www.base-search.net), DAREnet-NARCIS (http://www.narcis.info)). Such systems offer web portals, services and APIs for cross-operating over the metadata records of publications (lately also of experimental data and compound objects) aggregated from a set of repositories. Generally, they consist of two connected tiers: an aggregation system for populating an information space of metadata records by harvesting and transforming (e.g., cleaning, enriching) records from a set of OAI-PMH compatible data sources, typically repositories; and a web portal, providing end-users with advanced functionality over such information space (search, browsing, annotations, recommendations, collections, user profiling, etc). Typically, information spaces also offer access to third-party applications through standard APIs (e.g., OAI-PMH, SRW, OAI-ORE). Repository infrastructure systems address similar architectural and functional issues across several disciplines and application domains. On the one hand they all deal, with more or less contingent complexity, with the generic problem of harvesting metadata records of a given format, transform them into records of a target format and deliver web portals to operate over these records. On the other hand, they have to cope with arbitrary numbers of repositories, hence administering them, from automatic scheduling of harvesting and transformation actions, definition of relative transformation mappings, to the inherent scalability problems of coping with ever growing incoming records. Existing solutions tend to privilege customization of software, neglecting general-purpose approaches. Typically, for example, aggregation systems are designed to generate metadata records of a format X from records of format Y, and not be parametric with respect to such formats. Similarly, the participation of a repository to an infrastructure is driven by firm policies and administrators often do not have the freedom of specifying their own workflow, by combining as they prefer logical steps such as harvesting, storing, transforming, indexing and validating. In summary, repository infrastructure systems typically provide advanced and effective solutions tailored to the one scenario of interest, while can hardly be applicable to different scenarios, where similar but distinct requirements apply. As a consequence, an organization willing to set up a repository infrastructure system with peculiar requirements has to face the "expensive" problem of designing and developing a new software from scratch. In this paper, we present a general-purpose and cost-efficient solution for the construction of customized repository infrastructures, based on the D-NET Software Toolkit (www.d-net.research-infrastructures.eu), developed in the context of the DRIVER and DRIVER-II projects (http://www.driver-community.eu). D-NET offers a service-oriented framework, whose services can be combined by developers to easily construct customized aggregation systems and personalized web portals. D-NET services can be customized, extended and combined to match domain specific scenarios, while distribution, sharing and orchestration of services enables the construction of scalable and robust repository infrastructures. As we shall describe in the following, D-NET is currently the enabling software of a number of European projects and national initiatives

Now is the time to work together toward open infrastructures for scholarly metadata

As part of Open Access Week 2021, Ginny Hendricks, Bianca Kramer, Catriona J. Maccallum, Paolo Manghi, Cameron Neylon, Silvio Peroni, David Shotton, Aaron Tay, and Ludo Waltman make the case for community action toward open infrastructures for scholarly metadata. Discussing the impending loss of Microsoft Academic, the need for more sustainable infrastructures and the contributions these can make to research equity, they outline how stakeholders across the scholarly communications ecosystem can contribute to making open metadata a reality now

Assigning Creative Commons Licenses to Research Metadata: Issues and Cases

This paper discusses the problem of lack of clear licensing and transparency of usage terms and conditions for research metadata. Making research data connected, discoverable and reusable are the key enablers of the new data revolution in research. We discuss how the lack of transparency hinders discovery of research data and make it disconnected from the publication and other trusted research outcomes. In addition, we discuss the application of Creative Commons licenses for research metadata, and provide some examples of the applicability of this approach to internationally known data infrastructures.Comment: 9 pages. Submitted to the 29th International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems (JURIX 2016), Nice (France) 14-16 December 201